This weekend, we had our adoption home study visits! If you haven't read the story about how God worked out this home study so quickly and perfectly, you can read about it here.
Marcus and I were nervous for our home study visits because we hadn't ever done a home study before but things went great!
When I called on October 12th to schedule our home visit and was told I had 12 days to get as many of the 26 separate things checked off our list as possible (preferably all of them) I went into beast mode. Each of the 26 steps required several signatures and included dozens of forms to fill out per step, and we also had to get physicals, fingerprints, background checks, and more. The reason that home studies usually take 3-6 months is because there's so much paper work. Thanks to my type-A get-it-done-now personality, we completed everything just in time for our home visit yesterday (Saturday, October 24th) including 16 hours of adoption education! Boom. We rewarded ourselves with some of our kids' Halloween candy that they got at our church's fall festival. (Don't tell them.)
fingerprints: check
physicals: check
education and all paperwork: check
reward = chocolate & Netflix
And for reference, here's a before and after our faces pre- and post-home study:
In my heart, I knew we'd be approved for our home study because God ordained this whole process and we knew we were called by Him to adopt. But my flesh had doubts and I was nervous.
Thank you to everyone who prayed for us during this time! We were told that there's no reason we won't be approved. Right now we just have to wait for our case worker to get all the papers signed, organized & notarized.
As far as our home visits the past two days, everything went perfectly and our case worker was very impressed with how fast we got all our forms done and how organized we were. She also loved the story of how our international adoption process came to be, and she was very interested in our love story. We were able to witness to her about why we thought our marriage would last when about half of marriages fail (this was one of the interview questions she asked us) and we had a chance to share our faith, how involved we are in our church, and the ministries we participate and volunteer in. She loved listening to how God has orchestrated everything in our lives. We are so thankful that He is using us for His glory!
We also told our case worker about a shop here in Janesville that we just discovered ourselves. It's called Jinja Fair Trade Gift Shop and it's just a couple of minutes down the road from us! We heard about this store in our local newspaper last weekend and just had to check it out. It's a fair trade shop, and the items for sale in it were handmade in Uganda (mostly in Jinja, Uganda) and the profits from the sales of these items goes right back to Uganda to help their organization which is called the Hope Institute of Uganda. They provide education, health care, and economic opportunities for young men and women in Uganda. The Jijna Gift Shop has been in our town for a few years and somehow we never knew about it, but it just happened to be featured in our newspaper right around the time when we decided to adopt from Uganda! How cool is that?
Marcus and I checked out this shop on Friday, and we told our case worker about it, and she went after our visit on Saturday to look around. While we were there on Friday, we were able to talk to the owner (who is from Uganda himself) about our plans to adopt from there. He gave us some travel tips and information. The kids got to play some Ugandan instruments, hear some African music and play with some handmade toys.
We ended up buying Ezra a cool metal car, and we got Selah a big doll that had a baby doll tied on the back (yay for babywearing!) and I got a keychain and a bracelet.
So awesome that this Jinja shop has basically been in our backyard all this time!
Our next step is to wait for our home study to be approved. In the meantime, we need to file our I-600A (which is a bunch more paperwork!) and then do more fingerprinting, and wait for approval for that which will state that we are approved to adopt internationally. From there, we assemble our dossier, which is all the paperwork and files that we send to Uganda.
So, I see a lot more paperwork in our future, and also a lot of waiting! The I-600A approval can take 8-12 weeks. We are praying that things move faster than that, which has been how our whole process has been working so far! We know that God will ensure the perfect timing of it all.
Thank you again for all your prayers! We need continued prayers that things move quickly, that there are no delays or huge hurdles to jump, and that God continues to show favor and have His hand in it all.
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